Tag Archives: reform

In addition to largely ignoring tort reform, the health reform process is ignoring the hash that Congress and courts previously have made of ERISA’s pre-emption of state tort suits against health insurers. Readers will recall that, according to AETNA v. Davila, 542 U.S. 200 (2004), personal injuries caused by insurance claims denials cannot be adequately […]

With the exception of the ludicrous death panel accusations, it’s hard to find an area of health policy that is subject to more demagoguery than the ongoing debate about medical liability. The level of distortion and the amount of misinformation (i.e., outright falsehoods) has all but obliterated any chance for a reasoned debate. In an […]

The House Republican alternative health care reform bill is now available. There is little new in it. It mainly recycles ideas like association health plans and interstate insurance sales that have been pushed for years. The bill is important, however, because it does highlight the issue of malpractice. The bill contains a familiar package of […]

Thinking about using tax law to enforce either an individual or employer mandate has led me down the dark paths of seldom-discussed constitutional provisions relating to excise, direct, and income taxes. At one surprising turn, I encountered the Murphy case from the D.C. Circuit, 460 F.3d 79 (D.C. Cir. 2006), rev’d on rehearing, 493 F.3d […]

Congress is not writing on a clean slate in enacting health care financing reform legislation. We already have, of course, massive federal health care programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Hundreds of pages of the bills Congress is considering are consumed by amendments to the statutes governing these programs. The legislation […]

In my post of September 27, I raised the issue of the absence of procedural protections in the proposed health reform legislation. The Senate Finance Committee America’s Healthy Future Act shows some progress on these issues. Section 2225(e) of the bill obligates the states to require insurers who offer plans through the exchanges to provide […]

Please join the O’Neill Institute for our symposium, “State of the Debate: Legal Issues in Health Reform,” on October 26, 2009. “Legal Solutions in Health Reform” is a project of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The project, an extensive analysis […]

In my article on ERISA preemption for the O’Neill Institute’s Legal Solutions in Health Reform, I argued that pay-or-play initiatives, such as those enacted in Maryland, San Francisco, and Massachusetts, are vulnerable to an ERISA preemption challenge. Two Circuit Court opinions present the issue directly. The 4th Circuit overturned the Maryland law based on ERISA […]

On October 6, 2009, the O’Neill Institute hosted a panel on “Medical Malpractice and Health Care Costs: Can Tort Reform Bend the Curve?” to discuss the likely impact of proposed tort reforms on medical mistakes, malpractice system costs, and overall health spending, and why politicians and the press don’t always pay attention to the existing […]

As Tim Jost well explains, the principle of Federal Supremacy is so well settled that the threat by some state governors or legislators to bar their citizens from complying with federal health care reform is overt legal defiance, or a form of civil disobedience if you will. Civil disobedience might be justified in some circumstances, […]

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The views reflected in this blog are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law or Georgetown University. This blog is solely informational in nature, and not intended as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed and retained attorney in your state or country.